Random Gruesome Ways People Were Executed By Popes And Other Catholic Authorities (8 items)

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  (#6) Immurement: Walled Up And Left To Die

  You probably haven’t heard of immurement. To be immured was to be put, by the Church, into a space with no exit. Sometimes, this meant building a room around the condemned, but in other, less lavish, cases of immurement, the condemned was simply shoved into a coffin.

  Proper immurement meant starving to death or dying of dehydration, while immurement in a confined space, such as a coffin, led to death by asphyxiation. 
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  (#5) The Ax: Like A Hot Knife Through Your Neck

  Sometimes, the simplest methods are the best. As the Medieval Inquisition spread, agents of the Church went from village to village finding new supposed witches and heretics to persecute.

  The problem was, if they were found guilty, these agents didn't have the usual tools to carry out the execution. So, they had to settle for axes to decapitate people with. Crude, but it got the job done. 
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  (#4) Water Torture: Forced Ingestion While Choking On Cloth

  Water torture, also known as the water cure, was a common technique during the Spanish inquisition, used by those acting on Catholic authority to brutalize accused heretics and anyone else they didn't like. The accused had their mouth pried open with a bit of iron and a cloth stuffed into it. Then, buckets of water were forced down the accused's throat for choking. The water also lodged the bit of cloth in the accused's throat, for a bit of extra choking fun. 

  In some cases, to be extra nasty, interrogators used boiling water or huge quantities of vinegar, expediting the process with a funnel. In at least one documented case, a man accused of demon possession and of being a werewolf died of a distended stomach. Interrogators claimed the werewolf in him went a little wild and drank so much water that he died. 
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  (#3) Boiled In Oil: More Or Less Self-Explanatory

  During the Roman Inquisition, it was a good idea to keep your head down and your ideas non-controversial. Unfortunately, civil law student Pomponio Algerio didn’t get that memo.

  His philosophical ideas against the Church caught their attention, so they threw him in prison. After a year, he refused to change his views, so he was boiled alive in hot oil. It took him 15 minutes for him to die. 
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  (#8) Garrote: Strangled By Metal, Rope, Or Wire

  Garroting was an alternative method of strangulation commonly used in executions in Spain and Portugal for centuries. During the Inquisition, a garrote was used to execute some who were spared burning at the stake by conversion to Catholicism or recanting beliefs or statements. It was also employed by conquistadors working in the name of God and Spain in Latin America.

  As it turns out, garrote has more than one meaning. In abstract, the garrote is a way to strangle someone to death. In more concrete terms, it may be a sharpened wire or rope used to strangle someone by hand. Or, a garrote may be a sort of chair with a metal band attached to it. The metal band is wrapped around the neck of the person sitting in the chair and tightened to suffocate the condemned. It might also be simply a post with a rope around it, where the rope was used to strangle. 
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  (#7) Strangulation: Clemency From Divine Hands

  Whether they were spearheading an inquisition or rooting out nefarious Satanists and practitioners of witchcraft, popes and their minions considered themselves pretty clement guys. Those accused of heresy were typically questioned and tortured, during which time they had the opportunity to make a confession.

  If you confessed your heretical ways to Church authorities, they took mercy on you and strangled you to death. If you didn't confess, you would likely be burned at the stake. 

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